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21: The Whimper of Whipped Dogs |
| The table buckles a little, and there’s a notch on the edge where the chair connected, the chair which went up as a chair, came down as a toy hammer, and flew apart like firewood from my hands, easy as a magic trick, blink and you missed it, the kerchief is four doves fluttering away, the chair is four legs, a panel, and a few slats, and the piece still in my hand I send to the wall, just like giving someone a shove when they’re already swinging, just add to the momentum, let physics do the rest, watch them fly. Debris pattered on me; I’d taken out the ceiling light. That explained why it was so dark. It was relatively easy to stand the bookshelf upright again, since all its contents had been dumped on the floor in surprisingly neat rows, like delicate fallen dominoes. I began to load books back on the shelves, bending the damaged ones back into shape as best I could, until I reached the second row of Es, where Harlan Ellison resides, and soon I was sitting amid ground zero, reading from my first print of /Deathbird Stories/: [Start block quote] Nothing in the city could do her any further evil, because she had made the only choice. She was now a dweller in the city, now wholly and richly a part of it. Now she was taken to the bosom of her god. …[S]he drank deeply of the night, knowing whatever voices she heard from this moment forward would be the voices not of whipped dogs, but those of strong, meat-eating beasts (The Whimper of Whipped Dogs, p. 18). [End block quote] But now they had worked up the courage to peer into my foreboding lair, these creatures, these ghouls, as forlorn as they are devoted, as curious as they are repulsed. He and she both, hovering close together for support and protection against the Thing which keeps the castle, castles the keep, and otherwise maintains order with a firm hand until one night he growls and bares teeth like a feral thing and rearranges the library very loudly. “Do you need anything?” said Pamela. She was scared because Jack was scared, and Jack is never scared. It’s him I bared teeth at; he was in the way. I think he thought I was going to eat him. I think I thought I was going to eat him, too. It wasn’t a true frenzy. At least, it began as a regular fit: let’s throw something, shall we? Give it a toss, give it a go. Let’s be Danice and throw something, see how it feels. That slope is a slippery one, and I don’t have to name the fluid that makes it slick, do I? And only the night before I’d told Yannik the house had a No Tantrum policy. Goddamn. Good job, Barrow, joining your starry-eyed pup childe and your bewildered and frayed indentured servant (notice the denture in indenture) throwing abjectly stupid and pointless fits, and letting them witness it. Blame it on the Beast, even though you know better. “Listen to this,” I replied, as coolly as I could, still sitting cross-legged, and I proceeded to read them the ending quotation of the story in my hands: “When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible.” And when they had no response (to be fair, what would an appropriate response be? While we’re in this parenthetical, let me confess, Gentle Reader, that I find myself producing and consuming words, lengthy strings of words, whole pages and minutes of words, sometimes for no apparent reason, without even thinking about what I’m saying, reading, or writing, just keeping the words flowing like pouring cement over the pit where something foul is buried. Mix and pour, mix and pour, pour and pour and pour.) And when they had no response, I set down the book, rose to my feet, and motioned vaguely around the room. “Yes,” I said, finally answering Pamela’s question. “Clean up this mess.” |
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20: Chattel |
| By the time I arrived, they had her restrained and under sedation. They were only letting relatives visit, so, with a little extra charm, I became her step-brother. From what I gathered, she roused from unconsciousness twenty minutes after they brought her in and immediately climbed out of bed and half-staggered, half-crawled down the corridor, barely aware of her surroundings, moaning that she couldn’t miss court or she’d be fired. She fell down a flight of stairs fleeing from hospital attendants and had to be cornered on the landing of the staircase. It took six people to immobilize her, three of them men, and there’s an impression in the wall surrounded by a halo of thin cracks where, according to a chatty patient who got up to see what the commotion was about, her elbow connected during the standoff. She fell into a partial swoon again, and as they carried her back to her room on a stretcher, she mumbled the whole way about having to get to court at all costs, until they sedated her and she went under. Jack located her, though it was no easy task. She was a Jane Doe. Her purse had been left in the wreck, she had never identified herself, and, apparently, no one at the hospital knew who the car she had been driving belonged to or bothered to find out. She was just a woman in her late 30s, dressed and made up for a formal event, bruised and nicked, missing her shoes and an earring, and remarkably, frighteningly strong. I remember clearly the sequence of her waking. She began to stir, and opened unfocused eyes, and found that her wrists and ankles were bound to the bed, and looked down at herself as if assessing her condition, and lastly she saw me sitting there beside her. More confusion and silence, more surveying of her environment and person, then suddenly she made an outburst in a croaking voice characterized by the worst kind of hope, the hope that lingers after failure, the hope that is a fading ghost and knows it: “What time is it?” My reply was characterized by the worst kind of humor, the kind that intends to twist tragedy into comedy, but only twists the knife: “Approaching midnight, but a better question would be, ‘Where are you?’ Because I’m reasonably certain I told you to go to court, not the hospital.” The sound she made—how does one describe it? She didn’t open her mouth. It was a moan or a squeal in her neck, but it came from great, tectonic depths, from Antarctic distances, miniscule but somehow immense. The cry of a seagull a thousand miles off course, tangled amidst a flotilla of gulfweed it thought was solid land. She tilted back her head on the pillow and there came that sound. Hearing it hurt my chest. What do you say to her at a time like this? When reality sets in and becomes incandescent with itself, reality glowing with reality, and it pushes out to you, and you can feel your existence within it like a weight on a membrane, and you can feel her existence too, flat out with her head back and her eyes fixed on the headboard, and you see a stray eyelash clinging to her cheekbone, thick and gritty with mascara, and you think, she has eyelashes, she’s real, a person who has a past and had a future, and what does that make me, to have stolen her and changed her and made her a chattel? But these moments of hyper-reality always pass, and sooner rather than later. Whatever I said, I don’t think it helped much. I told her it wasn’t her fault. I may not have used those words, exactly. I may not even have really said that at all, or anything like it. Why can’t I remember what I said? I know I told her to quit acting suicidal and crazy, if she wanted to get out any time soon. I had them release her the next day. It didn’t take much convincing; they need the space, and her injuries weren’t too serious: a moderate concussion, two fractured ribs, and assorted bruises. She wasn’t charged with anything or committed. Her behavior, it was decided, was trauma-induced, the result of a concussion, and nothing more. Physically, she is recovering quickly (though not too quickly; after all, when she goes back to work, they will be expecting residual injuries), but any idiot can see she’s deeply depressed. On top of that, she’s been sick with some kind of cold or flu, which I confess I hadn’t noticed, nor even thought she could get. Sick and sleeping three hours a night, then busting up bar fights and frisking gangbangers and tackling corner store robbers and dragging wife batterers out of their front yards with their spike-collared Dobermans jumping at her or whatever other bullshit goes on in her other world, her fake world. Then getting dressed up to be a proxy at a court of jade and alabaster, surrounded by land sharks at least as unpleasant as I am, and worst of all, wholly unfamiliar. It was a disaster waiting to happen, wasn’t it? I may as well have ordered her to wrap her car around that traffic light. But someone has to do it, sometimes. Someone, whether it be her, or Jack, or the next poor fucker I’ve got my eye on, someone has to step in and be me, sometimes. There just aren’t enough hours in the night, and I can’t be in two places at once. Meanwhile she’s depressed and brooding in her suite, and I am in here writing. I went in there not long ago to check on her, but no words were exchanged between us. There’s nothing to say, no pleasantry or platitude to whisk away her condition, the way she could whisk away the purple-yellow lump above her right eye if she wanted to. There’s just the thick, expectant silence waiting to receive a command. So instead I fix things the only way I know how, and the only way that counts: I shed. That’s it. There we go. No more blues. Blues washed away on a red tide. Your bitter devotion turns to blissful devotion for a few more hours, and I extend my lease on you. It’s win-win. |
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19: Ink and Breath |
| Here is what you do if you need to destroy a document but you don’t want to start a waste paper basket fire or use your fireplace (because heaven knows it only takes a speck of glowing paper wafting through the air and landing on a drape to make kindling out of a house): just add water. Fill a pot with water and dunk in the pages. Let soak, then agitate with your hands. Rub away the ink and rub away the fibers. Press into a pulpy mass, and stretch into fleshy strips. Rinse, repeat. And a paper shredder simply won’t do. If a college dimwit tweaking on speed can spend thirty-hours straight arranging and taping the shreds of your bank statements and other sensitive forms back into shape, a ghoulish secretary hurting for the Old Wine can do better. No. When you’re on-the-go and fire-conscious, only a water treatment will do. This is how I destroyed the last letter I wrote to J before I found out she was napping; I drowned it. It melted in the pot, adding to the soup of starchy paste composed of many other personally identifying documents from my past. I am cleaning house, you might say. I have also recopied my entire journal up to this date in more obscure, ambiguous language. I briefly entertained the notion of using a secret code, but what’s the point? Any code I would come up with would be more trouble than it would be worth, and a determined spy would crack it. Besides, this journal is poor evidence of my gangster activities. Either one has much more damning evidence that I’m a crook and a parasite on society, in which case this journal is useless, or one doesn’t, in which case this journal is /certainly/ useless. I am, after all, a published fiction author and owner of a literary agency. Naturally, this is my oeuvre-in-progress, n’est-ce pas? Recapitulation of recent events: Challenging Kien about him stealing from me was a bad idea. I paid for it, psychologically, dearly. He’s not an unreasonable man, as it turns out. Mister Hatfield located an instructor for me, who has helped prepare me for a task that Kien asked of me, one that will require me to know what I’m talking about when I talk about Chinese art. In return, I got Hatfield off the banned list for most places of worth in the city. I was given a child, Yannik, one of the pups abandoned by the Savages. I enjoy teaching him, and somehow he manages to like me, even when I’m curt or mean with him, which isn’t too often, I think. It’s odd raising a Savage when I’m a Succubus, but our talents are curiously similar, although his target the animal kingdom, mine the kingdom of men. I used to think he was perhaps not very bright, but the bolder he gets in talking to me, the smarter he seems. At least I snapped him out of that shocked and self-pitying stage early on and didn’t end up with a second Kantus on my hands. Got to hand it to the Savages: they are self-reliant. Madam Josephine went away without saying goodbye. I’m not really all that surprised. Kyra also left before her training was done. At least Brock and I have an understanding, in case she returns. Mister Wallace panicked when the new Spear moved in, and he used our alliance against me. That’ll teach me to trust the faithful. The problem with the faithful is that they truly believe that everything has a purpose, that the Supreme Being has planned everything out, and will not let it fail. They believe there is a vast celestial scaffolding, a safety net hitched from one pillar of the universe to the other, and that even if they fail or go astray or lie and betray, the scaffolding will hold, the net will catch them, or at least catch the one they betrayed, and the Great Scheme will sway a little and be untroubled. They believe, ultimately, that morality and honor exist beyond the shores of the mundane world and that those virtues are still “out there”, within the spiritual, even when individuals temporarily lose track of them. But people like me know better. Morality and honor and all that good stuff most likely do not transcend the material. If they do, we couldn’t possibly be certain of it, and it’s far more probable that they don’t. Either way, a man like me knows that if he betrays his allies, he has popped the sacred bubble, and revealed it to be nothing but a skin of air stretched atom-thick around more air. There is no net. There is no latticework, no scaffolding beyond biology, necrology, sociology, requiemology. Every time you destroy a piece of the froth of honor we spit up around ourselves from our own dust and juices, it is gone forever, until you spit some back out, if you can bring yourself to do it. Honor comes from us, from will, from spit, from word. It only exists because we agree it exists. The social contract is written on a breath and two sighs. The faithful, however—they will stab you in the Adam’s Apple and call themselves sinners, and call you a sinner, and be reassured that everything is still right in the world because honor, as an ideal, is unscathed, and God still looks out for us. No, you shitheads. No one is looking out for us. No one but us. There’s only me and a million half-way decent people (who try to keep their word when they give it), two billion sociopaths, and four billion of you, who swing back and forth between decent and sociopath as the wind blows. Or at least these were the figures when I sucked air. The ratios are the same, anyhow. So Mister Wallace can keep his magical decoder ring. Moving on. I gave Danice a small taste of what the Council of Three will be like, and I tested her sincerity and her behavior under pressure. To her chagrin, I didn’t give her any answers or real coaching, only giving her an impression of the kind of direct and uncompromising questions she might be asked; in fact, I made her devise the questions herself. As the swirling chaos of the cosmos is my blind and idiotic witness, I hereby promise that I will reject her petition if she fails my expectations, but, in all honesty, I believe her answers will be at least as sincere and desirable as Kyra or Brock’s were. In fact, they will probably be better, because she will be pressed at least as hard as Brock was after his transgression, and she is less shifty than he is. While I’m on the topic of transgressions. Adrian White. Adrian! Finding ourselves without our three leaders, we three younger ones huddled together. We held power meetings, we talked plans and unity and Invictus, Ra! Ra! Ra! And Adrian decides, out of the blue, to announce that I’m unfit for leadership because on only two occasions since I was made, I spoke too soon, or went out on a limb to support an ally who fucked me with a cross and called it trust. He wouldn’t listen to reason. You know it’s serious when even Brock and I agree that something ain’t right. He argued that the only two remaining full-fledged Victors should have equal say in the Inner Circle. Equal say! Maybe, just maybe, if he and I occasionally agreed or saw things in a similar light, we might be able to play the role of two vice presidents in the Oval Office, but we have almost the exact opposite views on several key points of Invictus ideology, and our differences fractured the admittedly tiny group. That’s the problem with not having a single leader. That’s why McCarthians have been such a joke. That’s why there aren’t two presidents or two kings or two popes. After all the discussion and the contribution and the debate, someone has to stand up and say, “Here’s what we’re doing,” and the others nod or grumble and they go do it. That’s how the world works—at least the parts of it that /do/ work. You can’t put five goddamn goldfish together without one of them taking charge. That’s nature. The points a couple of people have made, that we are both young and untested, are valid points, but the solution is not to cut off one young, untested head and try to grow two in its place, especially when those two heads don’t agree. The solution is to pick /one/ head and let it lead, and see if the group thrives. And if it doesn’t, cut off that head and try another one. Perhaps most infuriating, aside from him ignoring precedence and hierarchy, was that after starting this unrest, he repeatedly refused to become our leader himself when I willingly and sincerely /asked/ him to take the lead, once it became clear that he would never follow any of my orders, whereas I /would/ follow his if it meant preserving the integrity of our covenant. And then, just like that, he turned around and acknowledged me as leader. Then quit. And Josephine thought /she/ seemed fickle. I was especially amused by one person’s suggestion that we should just work as a team until a more qualified leader “comes along”, as if by magic. Oh, and do you, ma’am, have a suggestion as to who that person should be? I’m sure you do. No thanks. We’ll grow our own leader from our own stock. The rumor is that Adrian left the group because Brock and I threatened and marginalized him. That makes me want to laugh until my jaw comes unhinged. If only that mouthy bitch had seen the “Adrian incident” before her very eyes. But of course, she wouldn’t understand, being a Carthian. I knew something was going on between Montrose and Adrian, but I wouldn’t have guessed it went this far. He tried so hard to make her an honorary member, as though we need a truly old firebrand shark stepping on our coattails and listening in on our meetings simply as reward for giving us a pep talk about politics and semantics. Right, Adrian. Maybe we should let in Hatfield, too, because he’s a swell guy, or Yannik, because he’s adorable, or Hazel, because she’s real helpful and, golly, she’s the Prince, or Mister Wallace, because he said he was my ally and he, gee whiz, he /meant/ well. Let’s let them all have honorary membership! What a fucking atrocious idea. Josephine, I don’t know what you were planning, but perhaps you should have let me in a little on the different ways in which he and I were embraced, and to what ends. So now he’s a born-again Spear, abandoning the group to be a soldier of god. Good riddance. He’s still my brother, but we’re better off without him, and he without us. Now to find my pup, who will soon not be my pup anymore, and see if he would like to paint the sign of the new Elysium, which I have named. |
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18: Islands and Iron |
| As I write this 18th entry in the little black Moleskin notebook—which, because I refuse to write on the backs of pages, is more than halfway filled—I am eating my words. I have torn the upper right corners and most of the top margins from entry #12, and I am chewing on them. At first, the process was slow and dry, pestle and mortar, grinding and scraping, but once I manufactured saliva, the fibers turned to mush, and what is now being mashed between my wisdom teeth is nothing but wood-based chewing gum. I chew this gum because I’m a man of my word, even if I give my word in the kelp- and wrack-wreathed island of my own mind, and no one is there to hear it but me. No matter what the solipsists say, falling trees always make sounds, and promises are always promises. So, welcome, Mister Adrian. Welcome. I swallow this gum in your name, and will wretch it up later in yours, too, you son of a bitch. Here’s to hoping we learn to work with each other rather than against. In the island of my mind, I can hear Khao ranting about the tenets, about threats. I can hear Kyra admonishing, in her gentle way, about hierarchy. I hear Connor’s voice on the phone, saying, “That ain't no medium nothing.” They are both the actors and the Greek chorus, and their three separate comments are really one comment sung in unison, a combined message which I also hear. Strike while the iron is hot. Iron sharpens iron. And other parables about iron. Kien Zhao, I may have to serve you one night, but until then, the iron needs striking and sharpening. Brace for impact, Zhao. Post-script: I should remember to treat the ghouls nicely, for they have been good, especially Pamela. Finally, they have worked together to my benefit. |
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17: Moving |
| Gentle Reader, suspend your disbelief for one paragraph as I describe how in two days, I have paid for the construction of a chapel and witnessed a prayer to ancient Nordic gods. Both parties, the chapel builder and the Odin worshiper, probably hate each other, and both are aware that I am godless—although I highly doubt they have even an inkling how deep my atheism runs: I have no memory, not a single one, of believing in any god (the time I prayed to Santa Clause to deliver me from being lost outside in the snow does not count, as I was six years old, and extremely cold and frightened. Even then my thoughts rang desperate and hollow in my skull. From then on, I’ve huddled in every foxhole alone, and emerged from it alone). Despite my godlessness, these spiritual landsharks come to me, of all people, with their propositions and invitations. How I manage to attract such unlikely people surprises even me, sometimes. The chapel builder seems to come to me out of convenience, the Crone out of fondness, but both have suggested that I may be swayed to their respective covenants in time. It’s futile to explain to people like this why that just won’t happen. They’re not wired to understand. Better to shrug and let them find out as the decades go by. John Wallace gave me a ring, told me to focus my prayers on it if I’m ever in dire need, or something. Based on what Sloane mentioned about the nature of disciplines, devotions, and spells, I wouldn’t be surprised if this little ring has some extraordinary effect I could tap into, but if I have to pray to Yahweh to make it work, my time of dire need had better not be too dire, because otherwise the ring will just be a ring, and I’ll be dust, or whatever we become when we die. But, still, the ring is a symbol of my alliance with Wallace, and it is handsome and has a black stone. I’ll wear it until there’s a reason not to. I accepted Sloane’s invitation to witness a prayer. Hearing J, or anyone, talk about the covenants is one thing, but watching them in action is quite another. That boxer Adam Carver was there, too. The ceremony was quaint in every sense of the word, and charmingly worded, and dramatic, and even, I dare say, rather spooky, with the red Christmas lights popping out one by one (irony!) and Sloane’s high-pitched, growling intonation, which was unlike any voice I’ve heard her use. I was distracted a couple of times by what must have been critters scuttling around in the bushes, and I’m almost certain other guests were in attendance, staying out of sight but watching us. But I don’t regret having witnessed the prayer—yet. We’ll see what J thinks. At the very least, I got to drink my fill of vodka and beer, and got a good show. One thing: Carver better have marked my words and marked them well. If I find out there’s a rumor going around that Mr. Barrow is interested in joining the Crones, after my emphatic statement that I was not, nor ever will be, interested, he and I are going to have some serious words. Or Sloane and I. Another thing: I wonder if Wallace and Sloane realize that the central figures of their beliefs are essentially the same figure, sacrifice and all, spear and all. It’s all the same story to me, anyhow. Then there’s Adrian. We’re civil, and we’ve managed to have one or two chats that registered above absolute zero on the Kelvin scale, but I can only warm up to a man like him so much. Aside from his history of being a hired brute who, unlike Tom, appears to harbor not even a twinge of remorse for the things he’s done, he acts as though he’s always been a landshark (behavior which, in my eyes, is like vivid yellow and red pigmentation on a poisonous amphibian), and he uses disciplines on fellow sharks like a climber uses chalk, displaying no compunction against slinging them in Elysium. His latest flamboyance and disrespect I’ve chalked up to a bout of drunkenness, but if it continues, something will have to change, and it’s not going to be me. My irritation with him is lessened somewhat when I think of J tousling his hair as if he were six years old—Ha! I wouldn’t even allow her to tousle my hair like that. But that goes to show the difference between Adrian and I. He, the mere soldier-in-training; I, the heir. Mentoring Kyra is fun, I admit, and not only because she’s Kyra, and she’s naturally fun. The lesson on titles and voices was tedious in informational content, perhaps, and at times her eyes glazed over, but it’s a great relief to be teaching rather than being taught every night. And she may act as though the voices are only academic, but, oh, how she loves to use the intimate voice, even more so, it seems, now that she knows how intimate it is! If I had to guess, I’d say my letter and gift were well received. But now I have to leave off writing, because Pamela will be here soon, and I will be properly branding her tonight. If that goes well, she and Jack will help me move my things from my apartment and storage to the new house. Moving heavy objects with a burned wrist—I don’t envy her the task. As I learned with Jack, it’s a blessing that I don’t have to smell burning flesh if I don’t want to. I’m starting to get the feeling that that will be the theme of my existence as the years wear on. |
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16: Pamela in the Corridor |
| Pamela Sheehan, Jack Fultz, Tharagavverug—these are the members of my ghoulish family, for whom I act as father, boss, warden, zookeeper, and slave-master. One night, I managed to get them to all be in the same room together at Jack’s house, lined up as if for a choral recital, and the asymmetrical portrait they formed would be comedic if it weren’t macabre: Jack, tall and built like five sequoias squeezed into a cop uniform (and with the personality of a tree to match), Pamela, the shorter and more compact one who looked like she’d rather be on a barge to China with no possibility of return, and Tharagavverug the… well, the /puppy/, who is the only one of the bunch not ashamed of or concealing the fact that he wants my ichor. And I was the only one sitting, giving a speech, until I lost the thread of my words because the sight of these three dissimilar creatures, shoulder to shoulder to haunch, reduced to the same slavish level, suddenly hit me with that same heady wave of surreality that I had experienced the first time I attended court, as though any moment we were all going to break character, start chatting casually, remove our costumes, and walk off stage variously to our real lives as officers, literary agents, and dogs. But what really happened is that the surreal moment passed, and I found my words again, and I continued to talk about duty and secrecy, and the food chain, and how we’re bound forever and ever, and other things that I let roll off my tongue without really thinking about what I saw saying. The only reliable one is Jack, and as a consequence, he gets frightfully little sleep, having to be a hard-hitting cop by day and a manservant, private eye, and baby sitter at night. I’ve noticed his injuries. He’s spilled boiling coffee on his wrist, he limps from having missed a step on the stairs in the precinct, and from what he tells me, he almost failed to re-qualify with his sidearm. I gave him some time off to recuperate, and he actually looked relieved, which made me inexplicably furious with him, though I don’t think I showed it. Examining my reaction later, I decided that, One, I don’t like being reminded that he’s a real person, Two, I unconsciously want to work him half to death because he was Tom’s, and Three, I hate psychoanalysis. Pamela, poor Pamela. She suffers more than Jack because she’s smarter and more self-aware. Perhaps also because she didn’t undergo whatever hammer-smash mental conditioning Tom’s kind can surely put people through with their domination and their compelling Voice. She knows she’s hopelessly ensnared and addicted, but that doesn’t mean she’s at peace with her new station in life, now. We’ve been false lovers, false friends; I’ve shackled her in bathrooms with a tray of food and some Evian, I’ve let her roam free with Jack shadowing her at every step, and me shadowing her when he had to work or sleep, I’ve alternated flirtation and entrancement, interrogation and revelation, conversation and awe. She alternated cursing and weeping, sarcasm and pleas. The plan was to wear her down, but we’ve both been worn down. Sometimes I can’t even muster up the will to make a facial expression around her. Both of us are tired of her crying, so she’s giving up on that little by little. At least I’ve managed to convince her that I’m stronger than I actually am, so she doesn’t dare strike me anymore. Jack’s influence on her is difficult to gauge. Sometimes it seems that she revolts against a man she sees as having given up and become an automaton; sometimes she seems to look to him for cues and emulate him, especially when I’m in a foul mood, or she’s trying to be crafty and get some leeway with me for being good. I can still hear myself saying, “Right now, Pamela, there’s Jack at the top, followed by the puppy, followed by you. The dog fetches things when I throw them. What do you do, Pamela?” When she recovered from that sting, she pointed out in sour voice that the dog fetches things when /Jack/ throws them, not when I do, which was the wrong thing to say to me, at the wrong time, and she regretted it, and I regretted making her regret it. But last night there was a breakthrough. We had a relatively nice talk—well, admittedly, it was mostly me talking—about the future, the branching paths that she and I could take together, and which ones were in her favor, and which ones were less so. And I spoke of immortality, of a life of being respected for working hard and being useful, of the kind of privilege that being a good ghoul has, and the horror of being a bad one, and I spoke about wanting to present her to the others of my kind as someone who is capable and worthy and valuable, and I asked her how long she was going to hold out and be a bother and a burden to Jack and me, how long she was going to drag her heels and weep and be more trouble and more miserable even than a stupid dog. And I told her that she was smarter than Jack, and had more potential than him, if only she’d realize that potential. I told her I was waiting, and I could wait forever, but I wouldn’t want to. It was like watching an ice cube exposed to hot air: fractures appearing without any force, wisps of willfulness evaporating away, her whole frame sinking as she gave a sigh that seemed as though it had been stored in her bones and sinews rather than her lungs. It wasn’t any particular phrase I used, nor any particular abuse in the past couple of weeks, but the weight of them, and the weight of the future I was describing, that was too much. She had a look in her eye like she could see a dark corridor stretching ahead of her, miles long and miles thick, no exits, no issues, no forks, and knew, finally, that there was nothing to do but start marching. She said, “OK. OK. OK.” I said, “OK, what?” She stared at my wrist. I said, “You know what to do.” And she did. |
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15: Released |
| Things you do when you’re dead (and you’re me): Use blood for ink on contracts, join a club of modern aristocrats, go to a party in your honor, receive land and money, receive a slave, feed your slave, feed your dog, get nicer clothes, say yes-please-thank-you-ma’am, vandalize wealthy neighborhoods with your personal graffiti, prevent someone from being killed, get passed around between two women, anger both of them, raise your new brother, kill your new brother, bring someone dinner, watch a flogging, escape your own flogging, lick the floor, throw a party, fuck in a limo, sleep in your closet all day. If someone, two months from ago, had told me I would be living this sort of life tonight, I wouldn’t have believed them. The dog would have been a dead-giveaway. Me, own a dog? Manumission was easy. The mounting anxiety in the few nights before it was the worst part, but the ceremony itself was just an activation of all I had prepared, and, to be honest, I consider the real ceremony, the one that crystallized my conviction about the Invictus, to have occurred while I was alone in my apartment, thinking and writing. I spent two days composing my letter and speech, mostly trimming passages and words away, scouring off everything but the essence of what I felt needed to be expressed, and this process forced me to think hard about what I wanted from these people, what I wanted from this life. You can chat about power and tradition, and wax philosophy, and preen your plumage until it’s lush and smooth, but nothing quickens you to the gravity of a looming, life-changing decision until you stare at the tip of a quill pen and realize your blood is suspended there, gleaming and eager to soak into page fibers without the possibility of being called back into the quill. By the time the red ink had dried on the third draft of my letter, I felt I had crossed over and joined the Invictus whether they knew it yet or not, whether they accepted me yet or not. I came before them an Invictus; they only had to recognize it. The party was out of a dream. My recollection of dancing with Silvia Bancroft seems fabricated, like a false memory implanted by some conniving therapist to make me think the Ice Queen of Carcosa can actually be touched, albeit through kid gloves, without one’s hands passing right through a frosty cloud of etiquette and good posture. Even thinking her first name in the privacy of my head makes me mentally twitch, balking at the notion that she is anything but a walking title with the power to raise and kill. To say nothing of Hardy’s instigation and his gift of shackles, which have seen use already. Well, alright: to say /something/ about those shackles, because how clever did that guy think he was? As if I didn’t already know that I had moved from a simpler cage to one with solid silver bars and plush padding. As if I didn’t already know that joining the covenant would be folding myself away into a rigidly defined rank and role. As if all creatures, sentient, semi-sentient, and dumb, aren’t fixed on train tracks with nine-inch rail spikes. As if existence isn’t one long process of being railroaded by unseen and almost certainly unthinking forces, digging in your feet for traction, flailing for control, squinting in the wind as the scenery parallaxes past you on either side in a blurring rush. As if anyone ever makes any move that isn’t at the behest of the strings tied intravenously to their limbs. Yes, Thomas Hardy, the society is a gigantic skein of string, and we’re all packed together, you included, in runaway train cars with the dinosaurs and the algae, and no one can move an inch without cutting off someone else’s windpipe. I know this. Thanks for the tip, Hardy. Good riddance. She gave me the Amptons. But I already knew she would, though no one told me outright. Poor Julio, so frightened of what J would think of him once I pieced it together. Not that I fault him his fear. On the other hand, Bancroft’s gift caught me by surprise, and I’m afraid it showed. Funny how a string of six zeroes doesn’t look like wealth, but like a printing error. Among the other gifts I received, a ring from Joseph, the Native, a ring I quite like and wore for a couple of days, until his truly stunning episode in Elysium in front of Mr. Trevor Hatfield, Redriff, and me, which had me slipping that ring off my hand faster than a falling glass breaks. I haven’t finished the memoir I made him write, but if it didn’t help him to write it, my reading it can’t do him much more good. Speaking of Mr. Hatfield, I hope he appreciates how I treat him, considering the way my superiors do. Little does he know that through him, I learned how powerful boons can be, like, for example, how they can sometimes prevent an impatient, arrogant brute of a man like Tom from dealing harm to those who owe me. The look on Hatfield’s face when I almost made him repay his boon the night after his brush with certain doom? You can’t put a price on it. I’ll have to explore the extent of the boon trade as chance permits. By now, my symbol is on most of the Amptons. It took several nights of cruising, lurking, slinking, and waiting—not to mention the help of my retainer and Ceres—to cover the borders and some of the hot spots within the territory. The safest, most permanent spot for graffiti in a place as wealthy as the Amptons, I decided, was the sides of curbs, especially by gutters, where they look like a generic stormwater drainage system symbol the city might use. The symbol itself came to me in a flash of insight, two separate pieces clicking together and forming a stark, sturdy design bristling with corners and angles, built of diamonds and suggestions of diamonds, standing on its two pillars like a sentry. Odal, the Elder Futhark rune for heritage and estate, enclosing Fehu, the rune for wealth and cattle. The Odal-Fehu. How I like it. Although, based on what J mentioned, I may be adding a star to it to keep with tradition, but I hope doing so doesn’t muddle up its power with needless busy-ness.  Kyra and Sloane. Apparently, I didn’t have enough females dominating my life with J and Bancroft, so I had to go a fetch two more, just to complete the square and make things just a little more complicated. Not that I had to fetch very far, with both of them making sure at every possible moment to hang onto my arm in public. But am I really complaining? No, not really. Of course it feels good to be wanted. And, beyond that, they are the only ones, apart from maybe Julio, though we don’t talk very much, that I feel relatively comfortable around—except, of course, when they are around each other. One thing they teach me is to have a more balanced view of these night-time women, a view skewed by the fierce, distant regality embodied by my sire and her second-in-command. It’s clear that the younger girls are just that—girls, with all the expected desires and insecurities and baffling turns of mood and purpose expected of their kind. I really have to be more careful and, although I hesitate to say it, sensitive, because I’ve already crushed a few petals on both flowers, and I’m not sure if they are going to spring back up as they were before. Yes, I’m comparing women to delicate flowers. Gentle Reader, kindly fuck off. I don’t even want to write about helping Kyra grow her leg back after Tom got spontaneous with a large blade. The mistake I made helping her feed, the hours I spent racing through town looking for that goddamn woman whom I’d let stagger away into a taxi cab, the cold dread that seized me when I heard Kyra’s desperate voice messages. Let this be written on the matter and nothing more: there are two things—and only two things—that I promised J would never happen again. One of them is this incident. I wonder what became of the woman. On second thought, I don’t wonder at all. I don’t wonder even for a second. Still not wondering. The party was, amazingly enough, a party, like any other stuffy party. The general consensus is that it went well, although, for all I know, for every one who complimented me, three may be deriding me behind my back. It’s amusing how the unwritten rule seems to be that because I’m a Daeva Invictus, I will burst into tears or start throwing chairs because someone didn’t attend my party. It’s not my loss they didn’t bother to come. Her Grace was there, along with anyone else who really matters, so it’s their loss. What do I care what the bookworms and loners do when I had an unholy knot of Daeva women drunk off their asses, singing and dancing and crushing lives left and right with a bat of the eye at /my/ party? Let them who can’t spare two hours for some fun lurk where they may. Admittedly, I’d rather someone else throw the party next time. Tom had better appreciate what I did for him regarding the party, when common sense dictated I tell him to go fuck one of his bimbos and see how far that gets him. We’ll see if and when he decides to make me regret letting him pick himself off the floor a little bit. Really, watching him is a little sad, but also somewhat worrying. He hasn’t been humbled, only quieted. He’s the same Tom, just more cautious, and now he’s his own master. But I can’t end this lengthy entry with an account of my embarrassing display during and after Hardy’s punishment, can I? I don’t suppose it could really hurt, since several people already watched me make a beeline for the stage as violence exploded all around me and catch J’s exquisite wrist in my hands like a schoolgirl catching the most precious drifting wisp of dandelion seeds, only to have it vanish in a blink, a silk ribbon ripped from my grasp, leaving me to stare at my hands and wonder how a man could want a substance, any substance, so badly that he strides straight through a lethal knife fight just to get close to its source. But I can’t end this entry with an account of how, after everyone had left, and a couple of bodies lay sliced open and punctured on the stage, I got on my hands and knees and licked the floor where some wine had smeared, can I? No, I can’t. I’ll leave off, instead, by mentioning that the only blessing of that shameful scene was that no one saw its conclusion, not even Thomas Hardy, whose personal vinery sated me enough to leave the court chambers on my two feet, rather than four. I can’t describe how relieved I was to learn that I wouldn’t have to face him again, to feel the kinds of things for him that J’s ichor makes me feel for her. Goddamn, what a mess that would have been. |
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14: The Rubicon |
| Dear Diary, So much has happened that I have to write about it in pieces. This first piece will be about Pamela Sheehan. I’m sure you will enjoy it. That which delights in what is revolting. That which plunders graves and feeds on corpses. One and a half nights to manumission, and I had to take a perfectly good woman, virtually at random, and turn her into what J nonchalantly called a ghoul. Just a few draughts of my wine, and a pinch of willpower thrown in for good measure, and this unfortunate woman would be mine, to have and to hold, whoever she was. And let’s not kid ourselves: it was going to be a woman. Not only is my nightly circuit entirely composed of females, but, if my preoccupation with J’s ichor after only one drink is any indication, whoever drank from my personal vinery would probably get all doe-eyed and clingy, and I’m not comfortable with being in that kind of a boat with another man. Maybe when I’m a thousand years old, have lost all but my last marble, and have acquired /l’esprit ouvert/, I’ll be less choosy, but until then, I’m indulging whatever phantom of masculine sexuality yet inhabits this husk. Had I more time to make my choice, I wouldn’t have picked her. I can think of a few other women I visit on a regular basis who would have made more alluring candidates. Off the top of my head: Johanna the sterling mediator and amateur cello player, with a fashion-sense sharp enough to draw blood, a freckled baby face completely at odds with her sudden, salty-tongued wit, and repertoire of off-color stories and jokes expansive enough to earn her right of passage on any pirate ship, even if her fair sex doomed the sailors; Ohood the artist, who dons a Persian head scarf ironically, sleeps two hours a day in a communal loft on a bare mattress surrounded by canvases and paper bags full of fabric, and who spends her nights enacting performance art in the streets by scoring drugs off one person only to give it to someone else—and to whom few doors are closed; Margot the stockbroker with the burn scar on her right temple which does little to mar her beauty, who says she only works so hard because it gives her an excuse to unwind afterward with a couple of drinks, who drinks more than a couple and is no worse for the wear, able to demonstrate, without losing her balance, her startlingly quick kickboxing strike on a garbage can on the sidewalk which actually topples, despite being full to the brim with refuse; or Chiharu, heiress to the Saito motorcycle fortune, who finds the time between being gorgeous at any event she chooses to attend, to practice classical guitar and dance ballet. But sometimes you have to take what’s in reach, and at the time, it was Pamela. Not my type: too plain, too broad shouldered and thick-armed, with a wide face of rounded features that the eye soon forgets, framed in blond hair too short for my taste. But in my early nights, she had sufficed. And there she was again in the Irish pub which, naturally, was claimed by cops, but which, with judicious use of that art by which I make people pay attention to me even when they don’t want to, I’d managed to infiltrate weeks ago. She was surprised to see me; she probably thought our fling had ended after a few necking sessions, and it took a bit of enhanced coaxing to get her to leave the pub and come to my place—she brought up her fucking fiancé, an overbearing, Koontz-reading windbag whom it was clear she did not actually want to marry, but the duty she seemed to feel in carrying out that doomed union was heartbreaking, if I had much of a heart. But it turns out that I don’t, and so I shunted her to my lair, planting my powers of suggestion in her like teeth on scruff until she was full-blown in love with me, and there was no question where she was going tonight. As for me, all that magical footwork had me drained and hungry, but I would get hungrier still. Because next it was time to use another of my tricks, the one that makes people talk, though I evidently laid it on too thick; the compulsion I gave her to reveal her secrets was so strong, in fact, that it seemed to wholly overtake her, bringing her to tears even before the first confession was uttered. Her every perceived crime and sin welled up in her mouth and was gasped out while she wept, all of it, from the terrible child she must have been to have been abandoned by her biological parents, to the horrors of the first two foster homes she was sent to, to the various minor abuses she has committed in uniform or the major ones she has overlooked in her fellow officers, and everything in between. A theme emerged in all this confessing, the theme of a woman who condemns herself for not giving others enough, for being selfish or unwilling to fully put her own well-being on the line, for not having the guts enough to save every emotionally or chemically fucked up individual who crosses her path; this is a woman, I found out, who went to the academy not because she really wanted to be a cop, but because she wanted to please her foster father, himself a former cop, and so on, and so forth, and this was all very interesting, but the flood of revelations showed no signs of abating any time soon, and I was too hungry to care anymore, though it did occur to me at that point that I was crossing a line, wading deep into the rust-colored Rubicon bordering hell, now, and would soon set foot on the far bank, having dragged someone with me against their will. But now it was time to bring her soliloquy of shame to an end. For the first time, I took what I wanted without a show of romance. She had time to be alarmed, to back away from me, but once I connect, there’s no fighting, it’s all limp-limbed euphoria. And after I was slaked, Pamela sat there in a daze of false love, forced confession, and anemic lull, eyes open but unfocused, pale lips parted but forming no words. Then, it was her turn to drink. One drop of ichor was all the convincing she needed that what she was doing was the most natural thing in the world. And this is how I turned a woman into a ghoul. As for me, I don’t recall it being a very pleasant experience, but I can’t rightly remember the details of the sensation, because I was too busy broadcasting one thought to her over and over, as loudly as a thought can be broadcast, like a blast from a forest array of sky-needling radio antennas: Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. |
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13: Sink or Swim |
| What happens when you take a bubble bath with a shark in a motel? As it turns out, nothing at all. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. What happens is a great deal of circling the tub, much friction, some overflowing, a little splashing, and nothing else. Might as well be synchronized swimming or underwater ballet. But let’s not kid ourselves: it was fun. Strange, but fun. Once it became apparent that there would be—how should I put it—only a promising drizzle and no rain, I went where she led, danced her dance, said inane things when my lips were free, didn’t when they weren’t. On a related note, it’s nice not having to hold one’s breath while submerged; that’s a perk I hadn’t foreseen. By the end of the night, I was as clean as can be, and I smelled like bath gel for the next two days. She’s an odd cookie. What she gets out of my company is still unclear, but I’m starting to gather that it probably has little to do with me personally. Based on what she’s said, she probably can’t feel anything anymore that doesn’t involve a little desperation. In that case, she’ll probably grow tired of me, because I don’t do desperation. But, if, every so often, she wants someone to share a tub with her, I can be her rubber ducky. At least we’re both in the After Dark club, so we don’t have to keep up the cardiac Morse code or any of the rest of that twitchy, absurdly intricate semaphore that the warm-blooded engage in without thinking. We can float there like drowned lovers and no one gets uncomfortable, and no one has to count the seconds before the next blink, the next swallow, the next nostril flare. On the other hand, what happens when you insult an old shark, a religious one, at that? They swim away in mid-sentence, and you have to spend your days looking for a gift to appease their gigantic but wounded egos. Meanwhile, you make note of the fact that old sharks are laughably easy to insult. One would think that Elijah, with all his alleged power and his role as city Harpy, would have tougher skin, but just the opposite is true. It’s likely that the old, passionate ones are all one breeze away from a feeding frenzy, so he probably had to remove himself to prevent making a scene. Either that, or he truly is that self-important, which would be far scarier. What’s certain is that I won’t interrupt any future history lessons he gives me with any questions unless I’m sure they couldn’t possibly rub him the wrong way. It’s a shame, really, because while I was initially quite interested in hearing what he had to say, now I just want to get it over with. I can’t respect any system of beliefs that doesn’t permit its adherents any leeway for humor or irony. Or, inversely, I can’t respect anyone who takes his beliefs so seriously that even an innocent misunderstanding of them is criminal. Honestly, fuck Elijah and the god he rode in on. Because of that fiasco, I had to endure a slap from Her Grace that almost dislocated my jaw, as well as another lecture about the hierarchy. She had the gall to follow that up with some attempt at being tender, though we are well beyond that point, now. She can be tender with her new baby, the over-eager bruiser, for all I care. At least she pointed me in the right direction with Elijah’s gift. We’ll see whether he deigns to accept it, or whether it will turn out to be the wrong color and further offend his goddamn religious sensibilities. |
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12: The Foil |
| There aren’t enough hours in the night to be everywhere I need to be. There aren’t enough generous friends. There aren’t enough all-night copy centers. There aren’t enough excuses for not showing up at the office before eight. There aren’t enough days before my manumission to be in the position I want to be. There isn’t enough wine in the glass. About the only thing I have enough of is phonebooks. Adrian’s eight boxes full of phonebooks, and his smart-ass letter, written with all the style and polish expected of a mob lackey who thinks committing violent carjackings on someone else’s behalf makes him formidable. Ignoring the boxes wouldn’t make them go away, nor erase my handwritten name and cellular number from each one of the dozens of books contained therein, so I brought them in, one by one, eight round-trips, and stacked them along my wall. How could I be angry about such a comically hyperbolic reaction on his part? Annoyed, yes. But I soon found myself laughing. They could be useful. Throw a drape on top and, presto, new furniture, bulletproof, no less. I could reinforce a failing levee. And, if I ever need to burn something, I have all the kindling I could possibly need. One wonders what was going through that oxen skull of his, what implication I’m suppose to draw from this display. That he really, /really/ hates using someone’s home phone? That he’s willing to resort to anything to get what he wants, even, god forbid, use the USPS? That he might, without warning, lose control and write me a sarcastic letter? If I don’t give him the time of day, will it be ten crates of German cuckoo clocks barricading the hallway to my apartment? But what can you expect from a guy who introduces himself by saying he gets what he wants, when he wants it? As I insinuated to him, the reality is that he’s the guy smarter people use to get what /they/ want, when /they/ want it. I’m not sure if this observation registered with him, because he seemed too busy boasting about robbing and stabbing people for fun and his boss’s profit. Why I spent so long listening to him babble about being From The Streets mystifies me. Two days old, and he’s lecturing me on how to climb to the top of the dog pile, and I just sat there and soaked in it. It /was/ entertaining to watch him insert the word “Invictus” into a manifesto on freedom, self-reliance, and rule-breaking. I’m glad Master Brock was there to catch some of that gymnastic performance. It’s sad to say, but J basically embraced a bigger, bolder, more violent version of Mr. Che. I’m convinced she’s either exorcising demons of boredom, or the whole thing is a way of spurring me in some direction she prefers by setting me against a foil. I’m reminded of her drippingly wicked comment: “One day, Wade, you’ll have to kill.” Oh, Vade retro satana! As if somehow the fact that I haven’t needed to kill anyone is proof that I can’t do it when it needs be done. Maybe if I were stupid, ugly, and useless, I too would have had to attack people just to put food in my mouth. Turns out I can simply talk to people and have them see my way, or at least want to make me happy. Imagine that. Either way, all doubt has been removed: Whatever motivates Her Grace to embrace, it isn’t companionship. You don’t pick a guy like Adrian, out of all people, to be your companion. You pick him because you need something stabbed and someone to blame for it, and he’s just the guy for both jobs. Until then, it suits me to simply treat him like my unfortunately endowed little brother, whom I dare not show I pity. Why not smile and laugh, and pat him on the shoulder, and nod very seriously when he talks about how he can speak the language of The Streets? What do I care about The Streets? I didn’t work my whole life to stay off the goddamn streets in order to start worrying about who crawls around in them. And if we can be useful to one another, then why not? If he makes it through manumission, I will literally eat my words. I will eat this page. |
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